Photography has evolved from the early cameras using film plates, to cut sheets of film and later to standardized rolled film. Each step made photography more available to just about any user. Although still in use, mostly for professional photography, film cameras are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
An image sensor called a charge-coupled device was invented in 1969 at AT&T Bell Labs by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith and in shortly afterwards, Bell researchers made a charge-coupled device that could capture an image. These early devices were only capable of capturing images of a few hundred pixels, but these devices were truly the beginning of digital photography.
Today, the image sensors are capable of capturing images with resolutions containing over 10 million pixels (megapixels) and each pixel portraying up to 24 bits of color depth (e.g. using color filters and three image sensors).
Such image sensing enables current camera technology, but other technology shifts were required to make it as useful as it is today. One such technology is storage. Without compression, an image of 10 megapixels with 24 bit color depth requires 30 megabytes of storage. Fortunately, compression techniques have advanced to reduce this to closer to 3-5 megabytes per image. The compression requires significant processing resources while the storage of multiple images requires large amounts of storage. Improvements in processing, providing the performance needed to capture and compress images along with state memory such as solid state memory (e.g. Flash memory) or miniature rotating memory such as micro-hard disks. These technologies provided sufficient performance and storage for complete digital cameras that have become very affordable. Furthermore, advances in battery technology, such as lithium-ion, provides smaller, long-lasting power for these digital cameras.
Today, most digital cameras and many non-camera devices such as cellular phones have at least 4 gigabytes of storage and capture images with resolutions of from 2 megapixels to 16 megapixels. Many cell phones have integrated cameras capable of capturing still images and motion video.
There are two basic types of digital capture, still image capture and video capture. Digital still image cameras are usually capable of capturing motion video, but are not optimized for such. Likewise, video cameras are usually capable of capturing still images, but are optimized for motion video. These optimizations include physical features such as the size and shape, placement of the controls, view finders, holding straps, zoom controls, etc. In some examples, the optimizations include memory size, memory type, configuration, processor, battery, etc.
In general, to use a digital still image device to capture motion video, the user must set a control, either by a switch or through a menu. A similar operation is performed to use a digital video camera to take still images. When switching back and forth between still images and video, changing the control often becomes difficult due to the menu complexity or vision issues with switch settings, especially at night. For devices such as cellular phones, there is often a button to enter camera mode which, after operation, another button becomes the trigger, but the menu system must be used to change to video capture.
Still image cameras are often held differently than video cameras to promote a steady hand, whereas being steady isn't as important to be steady when taking video.
What is needed is a device that has image and video capabilities that detects how it is being held and automatically change between still digital imagery and video digital imagery.